Early Access - Are We Learning Drum Hand Technique The Wrong Way?

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Suppose you were a space alien, dispatched from a highly-advanced-but-distant planet, to report back about the activities and goings-on of Planet Earth, and your particular assignment was humans playing the drums.

Just work with me here.

You might write a dispatch like this:

“Humans who 'play the drums' spend an enormous amount of time on elaborate hand rituals using what they call a 'practice pad', all the while telling each other these are necessary to play the drums, then shame each other from using any of them on the actual drums.”

And further…

"Based on the proportion of practice pad videos compared to everything else, learning these very specific pad exercises must be hugely important to playing what I want on the kit."

Of course I’m being cheeky, but spot the lie.

In this video, I begin with a slightly outrageous conceit - that perhaps the humble pad is popular for some other reason than its pure utility for increasing skill on the drum kit…

…then spend more than 2/3 of the video speaking about why, indeed, I think hand exercises are very important, probably to insulate myself from criticism, because that will work.

Then we delve into a few reasons why practice pad stuff being near-ubiquitous online and in books - instead of a very helpful sector of drum instruction - and I say this with the ultimate delicacy…

…might be out of proportion with its utility to play the drums better, if that was truly the goal.

Learn basic technique and/or drill a technique change: absolutely.

Play in low-volume environments, or when you otherwise can’t access the kit: 100%.

Use as its own fun, related passtime, closely-related to playing the drums, but not 100% the same thing, and sometimes a practice-time cannibal if time is ever scarce, as long as we’re being intellectually honest: definitely.

But use for an hour for warmup in the same room as the kit, when you’re already year into playing drums, and there are other, kit-related things that would probably help more in the same amount of time?

[eyebrow raise]

Anyway, I’m sure if I’m lucky enough for this video to make any impact, it will get me in no shortage of hot-water, and earn me comments like “dude doesn’t have singles like Gianluca Pellerito, and he’s talking about the practice pad.” And to some degree I’m signing up for it with the outrageous title and thumbnail.

I hope people will take the time to consider the arguments, however.

Enjoy this one!

Early Access - Is Drum Practice Overrated?

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Today let’s run a fun thought experiment: What if we had to justify drum practice in a philosophical debate?

By extension, what do we actually mean by “deliberate practice”?

I used to have classmate who “didn’t believe in practice”. Seriously. He said you should get all your experience from rehearsals and gigs. And at the time I had no tools to refute him. Nothing he couldn’t counter with “you’re just parroting what you’ve been TOLD.”

So this week we think from first principles. What’s happening when we practice?

Because we can use the answer to start to draw a circle around good and bad practice, and when practice is most useful versus when it’s not.

And spoiler alert - you wouldn’t want to pay a rehearsal band to help you practice the ride cymbal by rehearsing with you for hours-a-day…

…but you also wouldn’t want to waste your time shedding something that wasn’t going to help in real life.

Those twin poles can help us locate a “sweet spot” for practice.

If you’re “in” for this journey, I invite you to watch, and leave your opinion below.

Exclusive Access - Full Length Improvisation "Inception" Lesson

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I have zero idea if this will be useful for anybody else.

It was sure useful for me.

I also suspect it will trend a little advanced. You can probably do approximate versions of this, but to make it take deep root you probably need to be patient.

With that out of the way, retrieving licks or idioms while improvising has always been a bit of a crap-shoot for me. Like remembering you’re dreaming when you’re dreaming. There were sort of two ways to access something you practiced: by crossing your fingers and hoping it would come out…

…or studiously forcing it in, with all the unmusical downsides.

A few years ago, I started to get pretty decent at teaching myself basic “building blocks”, workshopping those, and getting them to come out while improvising. And truth be told, that’s what I needed to be focused on for a few years. Just learning the basics, and accessing them in flow - playing things that sound like I wrote them down and practiced them, except I’m improvising them.

But key phrase - I wrote them down.

So it was a very effective process of spinning my own idioms and putting them together. Which only gave me one real direction to assemble stuff: inside out.

But what if you hear somebody else’s lick, or aesthetic, and want to assimilate that?

The missing step came to me as a result of an exercise I was doing with my jazz students. With respect to JP, in observance of our ongoing habit of not checking each other’s materials too closely because there’s some parallel thinking and neither of us wants to worry we were too “influenced”…

…it’s something I called “paradiddle flow”.

We figured out how to improvise a “matrix” of 8ths, using combinations of paradiddles and double paradiddles…

…then we could “inject” traditional jazz licks like those of Max or Philly Joe into the flow. Basically.

Fast forward a month, and I was listening to some pocket drummers and realized “I can do this with anything.”

In case this sounds like simple “practice the lick”, here are the novel bits:

• Previously, I’d either have to play the lick verbatim or not. I had no way to “stair stepping” it into my playing.

• Even after I discovered things like the switching exercises from my coaching program, I still needed another step: the “matrix” of ambient improv finally gave me that

As I said, I have zero earthly idea if anyone’s thought of explaining it this way before. (As I alluded in my interview with Gordy Knudtson, plenty of great players have figured it out in some form of fashion.)

But, novel or no, I’m showing it to you.

And if you’re reading this, you’re getting the full “members-only” version.

Enjoy.

Early Access - 5 Bad Ideas That Are Ruining Your Drumming

Today, we start the week off right (what?) with a classic rant.

Every few years, I have to let off a little steam, and aim squarely at all the misconceptions, half-truths, and lazy reasoning I see in my YouTube comments.

And as we head into summer, what better time than now.

Underneath the clickbait, the more subtle version of the argument is that there exist a number of statements that are true in some contexts, or even true most of the time, but which, to the wrong student at the wrong time, can be worse than no advice.

One of my favorites is “you should be able to play the simplest thing and still be interesting”. Sure, if we’re talking about Jack DeJohnette. But how is that going to land on a beginner who’s learning some basic jazz vocabulary, who by definition is least equipped to grasp all the subtleties - tension and release, touch, surprise, etc. - that make that Jack solo sit on a razor edge when he’s playing the simplest thing.

As I say in the video, sometimes “you should always season your food” is good advice. But said to a nervous culinary student with a gigantic salt shaker, who’s already added enough salt, maybe not so much.

It’s in this spirit that I examine 5 of my favorite hobby horses from YouTube comments over the years. People have been asking for more classic rants, so here you go.

Enjoy!